And the adventures, of course, need not be so extraordinarily venturesome, with an artist’s pen to put them on the paper. In 1887 Stevenson had been once more at the gates of death with hemorrhages, this time so often repeated that they had ceased almost to be exciting, and were rather grown tiresome; and when the doctors prescribed another change of climate, he sailed for America. The steamer turned out to be loaded with cattle,—“a ship with no style on, and plenty of sailors to talk to;” and this is how the consumptive patient describes the voyage: “I was so happy on board that ship, I could not have believed it possible. We had the beastliest weather, and many discomforts; but the mere fact of its being a tramp-ship gave us many comforts; we could cut about with the men and officers, stay in the wheel-house, discuss all manner of things, and really be a little at sea.... My heart literally sang.... It is worth having lived these last years, partly because I have written some better books, which is always pleasant, but chiefly to have had the joy of this voyage.”
Later, in the South Seas, he ran more than once upon the very edge of shipwreck, but always with the same brave heart and the same gayety. “We had a near squeak,” he writes to a friend, after one such experience. “The reefs were close in with, my eye! what a surf! The pilot thought we were gone, and the captain had a boat cleared, when a lucky squall came to our rescue. My wife, hearing the order given about the boats, remarked to my mother, ‘Isn’t that nice? We shall soon be ashore!’ Thus does the female mind unconsciously skirt along the verge of eternity.” And thus, be it added, does the artistic masculine mind turn even the face of death itself “to favor and to prettiness.”
By this time Stevenson had almost settled it with himself that he should never again leave the sea. “My poor grandfather, it is from him that I inherit the taste, I fancy, and he was round many islands in his day; but I, please God, shall beat him at that before the recall is sounded.... Life is far better fun than people dream who fall asleep among the chimney-stacks and telegraph wires.” One feels like saying again, What a blessing it was for the world that a man so perennially boyish, so endowed with the capacity for enjoyment, so conscious of his life, so incurably in love with the romantic side of things, was also the master of a style and an industrious lover of the art of writing!
His remark, quoted above, about the “plenty of sailors to talk to” suggests another thing: his exceeding fondness for rubbing elbows with what are called, inappropriately enough, common people,—people who have lived free from the leveling, uniformity-producing, character-dulling, commonizing influences of too many books and an excess of social sophistication. This, too, was a real fairy’s gift to a man destined for literature. “He was of a conversible temper” (he is speaking of himself in his youth), “and insatiably curious in the aspects of life.” Like Will o’ the Mill, “he had a taste for other people, and other people had a taste for him.” As we read of his journeyings hither and thither, and the friends he made almost as often as he opened his mouth, we are reminded of what David Balfour’s father said of his offspring: “He is a steady lad and a canny goer; and I doubt not he will come safe, and be well liked where he goes.” Perhaps it was from his own experience that Stevenson was writing when he said that a boy might learn in his truant hours “to know a good cigar, or to speak with ease and opportunity to all varieties of men.”
Stevenson’s books, the narratives of travel and the essays not less than the novels,—perhaps even more,—are galleries of portraits. Wherever he went, he found men: not caricatures, mere burlesques and oddities, cheap material for print, creatures of a single crying peculiarity, so easily drawn and, for one reading, so “effective;” nor lay figures simply, wire frames (literature is populated with them) on which to hang “the trappings of composition;” but breathing men, full, like the rest of us, of complexity and paradox, nobly designed, perhaps, but—still like the rest of us—more or less spoiled in the making; men who had known, each for himself, the war in the members (happy for them if they knew it still!), and had drunk, every one, of the mingled cup of tragedy and comedy. He loved the sight of them; their talk, wise or foolish, was music to his ears; and the queerest and ugliest of them, under his capable and affectionate hand, wear something of a human grace upon the canvas.
It is a great gallery. Who that has ever walked there will forget the old soldier turned beggar, the borrower of poets’ books?—“the wreck of an athletic man, tall, gaunt, and bronzed; far gone in consumption, with that disquieting smile of the mortally stricken in his face; but still active afoot, still with the brisk military carriage, the ready military salute.” We can see him, “striding forward uphill, his staff now clapped to the ribs of his deep, resonant chest, now swinging in the air with the remembered jauntiness of the private soldier; and all the while his toes looking out of his boots, and his shirt looking out of his elbows, and death looking out of his smile, and his big, crazy frame shaken by accesses of cough.” His honest head may have been “very nearly empty, his intellect like a child’s,” but he loved the unexpected words and the moving cadence of good verse. We know his talk; a little more, and we should hear it: “Keats,—John Keats, sir,—he was a very fine poet.”
A book like “The Amateur Emigrant” is full of such sketches, every one done from life, and hit off with a perfection that might well render it and the volume, as foolish mortals say, “immortal.” It would be long to enumerate them, though it is a short book. There is Jones the Welshman, for example,—“my excellent friend Mr. Jones,” owner and dispenser of the Golden Oil; “hovering round inventions like a bee over a flower, and living in a dream of patents.” He had been rich, and now was poor, but, like all dabblers in patents, he had “a nature that looked forward.” “If the sky were to fall to-morrow, I should look to see Jones, the day following, perched on a step-ladder and getting things to rights.” What we should have cared most to see was Mr. Jones and Mr. Stevenson walking the deck by the hour and dissecting their neighbors; for Jones was first of all a student of character. “Whenever a quaint or human trait slipped out in conversation, you might have seen Jones and me exchanging glances; and we could hardly go to bed in comfort till we had exchanged notes and discussed the day’s experience. We were then like a couple of anglers comparing a day’s kill.” And there is the fiddler, “carrying happiness about with him in his fiddle-case,” a “white-faced Orpheus cheerily playing to an audience of white-faced women,” with his fiery bit of a brother, who “made a god of the fiddler,” and was determined that everybody else should do the same; and Mackay, the cynic and debater, who professed to believe in nothing but what had to do with food (“that’s the bottom and the top”), but who once grew so eager in maintaining this noble thesis that he slipped the meal hour, and was compelled, with a smile of shamefacedness, to go without his tea; and Barney the Irishman, the universal favorite, so natural and happy, with his “tight little figure, unquenchable gayety, and indefatigable good will,” who could sing most acceptably and play all manner of innocent pranks, but whose “drab clothes were immediately missing from the group” when, after the ladies had retired, some one struck up an indecent song; and the sick man (poor soul), who thought it was “by” with him, and who had a good house at home, and “no call to be here;” and the two stowaways, so fond of each other, yet so strikingly contrasted,—one so ready to work for his passage, the other “a skulker in the grain,” and like the devil himself for lying.
And besides these there are numbers more nearly or quite as telling; but they must be let pass, though it is pleasant to pick good things out of a book that, comparatively speaking, seems to have been little made of, either by the author or by his admirers. To one of these, at least, “The Amateur Emigrant” seems, not one of Stevenson’s greatest books, indeed, but certainly one of the most enjoyable, say on the sixth or eighth reading.
It is a point of grace with any writer, and a very sine qua non with the essayist, that he should be able to speak often of himself without offense, as Montaigne and Lamb did, to mention two shining and incontestable examples. And the trick (though it is not a trick, but an admirable quality, and almost as far as honesty from being common) is none of your easy ones. To begin with, the venturer on such an experiment must be interested in himself, which is by no means an ordinary happening. Most men, we may say, count for nullities under this head; they recognize their outward presentments in the glass, no doubt, and are letter-perfect with their names and occupations; but for a knowledge of their inner selves, the story of their real lives, the “wonderful pageant of consciousness,” one might almost as well interrogate the lamp-post on the next corner. They have never kept company with their own thoughts, nor been in the least degree inquisitive about them. Life, as they live it, is a matter of externals, of eating and drinking and being clothed, of getting and spending more or less money, of being amused, of movings up or down on a social ladder. As for the past, the past of themselves,—which with another man is his dearest possession,—it is mainly as if it had never been. They must have had a boy’s dreams once, one would think, but that was long, long ago, and the dreamer is dead, and his dreams with him.
But if a man is to tell the world about himself, and charm it into attention, he must not only be in love with his subject; he must have a natural frankness, an unaffected and almost unconscious delight in self-revelation,—tempered by a decent sense of personal privacy,—such as infallibly commends itself and makes its way, the listener cannot tell how. In other words, and in a good sense, the man must be still a boy, endowed with a boy’s winning attributes, and entitled, therefore, to something of a boy’s privilege. And with all the rest, and among the most important, he must be favored with the gracious quality of humor. Of all talk whatsoever, talk about one’s self must not be too serious. No man (or none but a great poet) can safely indulge in it unless it is natural for him to see the funny side of his own foibles, and at the right minute to make his point at his own expense. All of which is perhaps no more than to say that the writer in the first person must be a man of taste, knowing (a wisdom which nobody under the sun can teach him) what to say and what not to say, and, chiefest of all, how and when to say it.